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Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc) are a bourgeois couple, although each has a secret lover and conspires to murder the other. They set out by car for Corinne's parents' home in the country to secure her inheritance from her dying father, resolving to resort to murder if necessary.

The trip becomes a chaotically picaresque journey through a French countryside populated by bizarre characters and punctuated by violent car accidents. After their own car (a Facel-Vega) is destroyed in a collision, the characters wander through a series of vignettes involving class struggle and figures from literature and history, such as Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Emily Brontë (Blandine Jeanson).

Corinne and Roland eventually arrive at her parents' place, only to find that her father has died and her mother refuses to give them a share of the spoils. They kill her and set off on the road again, only to fall into the hands of a group of hippie revolutionaries (calling themselves the Seine and Oise Liberation Front) that support themselves through theft and cannibalism. Roland is killed during an escape attempt; he is chopped up and cooked.

According to a letter from the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar to his translator Suzanne Jill Levine, the indirect inspiration for the movie was Cortázar's short story "The Southern Thruway." Cortázar explained that while a British producer was considering filming his story, a third party presented the idea to Godard, who was unaware of its source. Because he had had no input on the making of the film, Cortázar vetoed the suggestion to translate the story's title as "Week-End" to take advantage of the tie-in.[5]